We’ve just released DMDirc 0.6.3, which is our first release in 2010. From a development point of view, this release also marks the end of our support for Subversion. An overview of the changes included follows:

Window menu enhancement

The window menu now groups windows by server, making it much easier to quickly access a specific window (especially if you’re connected to lots of different servers!).

Addon browser

The addon browser was previously available in 0.6.3m2, but was not properly functioning in that release. DMDirc 0.6.3 presents a functioning addon browser, allowing you to browse through plugins, themes and action packs from within DMDirc, and download and install them with one click.

Backgrounds

You can now specify background images for both the textpane and the main ‘desktop’ area.

Topic improvements

A brand new topic bar now adorns the top of channel windows, allowing you to easily see the current topic at a glance, and edit it right from the channel. The topic history display in the channel settings window has also been completely revamped, showing much more detail than it did previously.

Improved URL and channel linking

DMDirc’s already intelligent URL handling has been improved further, now allowing some extra characters to ensure compatibility with non-standard URLs. We’ve also applied the same techniques we use for intelligent URL linking to channel name links, so trailing punctuation and brackets will no longer get in your way when trying to join a channel.

DCC fixes

We’ve fixed a whole raft of bugs in the DCC plugin, which should make it work much more reliably in more circumstances than ever before. We’ve also fixed a particularly silly bug which rate limited all DCCs to 10KB/s in past versions.

As always, we welcome bug reports and feature requests on our issue tracker, irc channel or as comments on this post. We will also respond to mentions on twitter. DMDirc 0.6.3 continues to be supported on Linux, BSD, Solaris, OS X and Windows, as well as having a standalone Jar file for any other java-capable platforms that are not specifically supported.

At the start of the month we quietly released DMDirc 0.6.3m2 as part of our new fixed release cycle.

DMDirc 0.6.3m2 is the second milestone release since 0.6.1, and the first release we’ve made as part of the fixed cycle. It contains a large number of bug fixes and minor improvements.

As this is the first release as part of the fixed release cycle, we weren’t used to the limited timescale between releases and as such our usual ‘quiet’ period between releases had a much larger effect than it does normally. This means that we didn’t get as many features into this release as we would have liked, but we still managed to squeeze a few in:

Textpane font settings

One of our most requested improvements – you can now set both the font name and size of the text displayed in DMDirc’s textpane. The options can be set globally, per-server or per-channel as usual.

Alternate parsers (Twitter support)

DMDirc can now support different parsers in addition to our previous IRC parser. This means better or alternative IRC parsers can be developed in the future, or we can develop parsers to interact with completely different systems. As a proof of concept, we’ve developed a Twitter parser which allows you to read your Twitter news feed and post status updates direct from DMDirc!

Configurable server names

You can now configure how DMDirc displays server names in the treeview and the titlebar. This means you can (for example) show your nickname along with the server name (useful if you often connect to the same server twice as different users), or show the network name instead of the server address (in case you use a bouncer to connect to multiple networks).

License panel

We’ve also tidied up the ‘License’ panel in the about dialog, to make it much clearer which components are covered by which license. This should make it easier for anyone interested in modifying DMDirc or reusing parts of it to see where they stand.

As we’re now committed to releasing on a fixed schedule this will be the last ‘milestone’ release, and for future releases we’ll just add to the minor version number until we’ve implemented the features targeted for the next major release. This means the next release will be 0.6.3, and any further releases before the 0.7 feature set is complete will be 0.6.4, 0.6.5, etc

As always, we welcome bug reports and feature requests on our issue tracker, irc channel or as comments on this post. We will also respond to mentions on twitter. DMDirc 0.6.3m2 continues to be supported on Linux, BSD, Solaris, OS X and Windows, as well as having a standalone Jar file for any other java-capable platforms that are not specifically supported.

After nearly a year, we have just released DMDirc 0.6.3m1, with over 1000 commits resulting in over 200 feature additions, bug fixes and other changes, including:

• A redesign of the preferences dialog
• Improved support for SSL certficates (both client and server)
• Support for SOCKS proxies
• Ability to automatically restart the client after installing updates
• Ability for plugins to specify ’services’ that they provide/require.
• Ability for plugins to export (share) methods with each other
• Improved MDI support
• A more robust DCC plugin
• Moving of the UI to a plugin, allowing for it to be updated separately from the main client

DMDirc 0.6.3m1 is one of our “milestone” releases of the 0.6.3 branch. These milestone releases were a (somewhat failed) attempt to release more often than we have in the past. We periodically decide to stop working on any new features and tidy up the current code-base into a release-ready state to allow users of the stable branch of the client to get some of the new features and fixes we have added sooner than having to wait for a full major release. It’s taken us almost a year to get to 0.6.3m1, so imagine how long it’d take if we went straight to 0.6.3 itself (which is approximately two milestones away)!

Users of previous versions of DMDirc should in the coming days be prompted by the automatic updater (if enabled) to update to the latest version of DMDirc. Alternatively, you can visit our downloads page to grab the latest version yourself.

With DMDirc 0.6.3m1 released we are now looking forward to our next milestone release, DMDirc 0.6.3m2. So far the issue list for this contains exciting additions such as improved handling of different charsets in channels, additional changes to plugins to try and make them less like black magic, server lists, improved support for netbooks (and other low-resolution systems), and a plethora of other bug fixes and general improvements to make the client nicer to use.

As always, we welcome bug reports and feature requests on our issue tracker, irc channel or as comments on this post. We’ve also recently launched an official twitter presence. DMDirc 0.6.3m1 continues to be supported on Linux, BSD, Solaris, OS X and Windows, as well as having a standalone Jar file for any other platforms that are not specifically supported.

Edit: It was recently brought to our attention that the OS X version previously released contained a bug that prevented the client from starting. This bug has now been fixed in the version available from Google code, we urge OS X users who previously downloaded and tried to use this version of DMDirc to try again with the fixed version.

After a long period of testing we have finally released DMDirc 0.6, and we think this is the best version of DMDirc to date with over 250 feature additions, bug fixes and other changes, including:

• Themes system revamp to allow multiple themes to be loaded at a time
• Completely redesigned Actions Manager and Actions Editor dialog (see our previous coverage of these)
• New installer for OS X
• The Linux installer can now be used for BSD-like OSs that have Java pre-installed
• The Linux installer can now be used on Open Solaris
• The automatic updater can now update plugins

As of DMDirc 0.6 we now support running on more platforms than before: we have installers for Linux, BSD, Solaris, OS X and Windows, as well as a standalone Jar file for any other platforms that we don’t currently provide an installer for.

Users of DMDirc 0.5.6 (or the recent unstable releases) should be prompted by the updater (if enabled) to update to the latest version of DMDirc. Alternatively, you can visit our downloads page to grab the latest version yourself.

With DMDirc 0.6 (finally!) released we are looking forward to our next release, DMDirc 0.6.3. This will include support for SOCKS proxies, improved support for SSL Servers, a nicer looking Preferences dialog, server lists and more.

As always, we welcome bug reports and feature requests on our issue tracker, irc channel or as comments on this post.

A security vulnerability has been discovered in DMDirc. The implementation of URL handlers allow specially crafted URLs to execute arbitrary programs on the host system. Only custom URL handlers (those listed as “custom commands” in the ‘URL Handlers’ section of the preferences panel) are vulnerable, and the user has to click on a malicious URL in order for the vulnerability to be exploited. The DMDirc developers have only been successful in using the vulnerability to launch argument-less programs on Linux, but we cannot guarantee that other platforms are not affected.

We have backported the fix for the exploit to the DMDirc 0.5 tree, and DMDirc 0.5.6 has now been released. We highly recommend that anyone using DMDirc 0.5.5 upgrade to DMDirc 0.5.6. Nightly builds of DMDirc up to and including the build released on the 22nd of May (designated revision 4055) are also vulnerable. A nightly build containing the vulnerability fix will be available for download tonight, and we highly recommend that anyone using DMDirc nightly builds upgrade as soon as it is available.

DMDirc 0.5.6 may be downloaded directly using the following links: Windows installer, Linux installer, Jar file.

If you have any questions, please feel free to join us in #DMDirc on Quakenet (irc.quakenet.org), or leave a comment here.